Chartism: A New History

Liberal historians, including Dorothy Thompson, engaged in debates with Marxist historians, most notably led by Gareth Stedman Jones, to a point that by the early 1980s, at a time when the Labour Party was in crisis, the parallels in the decline of the two movements did not go unnoticed, from which the "linguistic" turn emerged. The book has the feel of a story to it and is structured in a chronological way which pinpoints the key events in the history of the Chartist movement from the publication of the "People's Charter" to the organizational problems that dogged the movement throughout the 1840s, which the author rightly calls the period a "continuing saga of dissent."